Where Did the Order Originate?
There is evidence that the Order materialized more than three hundred years before the United Grand Lodge of England.
Secret societies, by definition, do not publish official histories.
We were unable to find any records that medieval stonemasons’ guilds existed at all in England.
Most stonemasons in the Middle Ages were illiterate.
Many kings and their mightiest lords have been Freemasons from the Order’s known beginnings to the present.
The ‘Old Charges’ date to the late fifteenth century. “No brother is to reveal any legitimate secret of another brother if it might cost him his life and property.” Whoever originated this Old Charge was aware that every brother lived with the danger of being branded a heretic. A group that lived on the fringes of the law of the land made these rules.
Another Charge refers to the provision of ‘employment’ for a visiting brother for the period of two weeks after which time “he should then be given some money and put on the road to the next Lodge.” Another Charge prohibits Masons from having sexual relationships with the wife, daughter, mother or sister of a brother Mason. (1) What possible heresy was early Masonic group guilty of, to create such a highly structured system of recognition and survival outside of the Church and State? Remember the central imagery through Freemasonry is the building of King Solomon’s Temple.
The Knights Templar, or the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, were formed almost six hundred years before the establishment of the Grand Lodge of England.
The Temple of King Solomon
There were four Temples associated with Mount Moriah in the city of Jerusalem. The first was built by King Solomon three thousand years ago. The next never existed – seen in a vision by the prophet Ezekiel about 570 BCE. The third was built by King Zerubbabel in the early part of the sixth century BCE after the Jews returned from their Babylonian captivity. The final Temple was being erected by Herod at the time of Jesus and was destroyed by the Romans in CE 70, just four years after its completion.
Solomon is referred to as a wise king, but the designation ‘wise’ had been bestowed on all the builders and kings who sponsored buildings for thousands of years before Solomon.
The Temple at Jerusalem was built by craftsmen hired from Hiram, the Phoenician King of Tyre. King Hiram has nothing to do with Hiram Abif. The ritual of the Holy Royal Arch Degree makes it clear that Hiram, King of Tyre, supplied materials whilst Hiram Abif was the architect of the Temple. These three individuals (Solomon and the two Hirams) held an important Lodge and were the sole joint holders of the true secrets of a Master Mason.
We can guess at where the great king’s priorities lay when the building to house his harem was a big as Yahweh’s Temple. (2)
This Temple was not constructed to be visited by men – it was, quite literally, the House of God; a home for Yahweh Himself.
There are no physical remains of the Temple of Solomon and no records of it, so no one can be sure whether or not it really existed; it might be an invention of later Jewish scribes. (3) The alleged Temple was built of stone and completely lined with cedar from Tyre. The walls were nine cubits (about 13 feet 6 inches) thick and rose to a flat timber roof of cedar topped with fir. Gold covered the floor, walls and ceiling, set amongst carvings of cherubim and open flowers. The interior was 90 feet long and 30 feet wide and the building was aligned from west to east with a single entrance at the eastern end. A partition divided the interior into t two thirds to one third split, creating a cube 30 feet in height, width and length. This was the Oracle of the Old Testament, also called the Holy of Holies, and known in Masonic ritual as the Sanctum Sanctorum, which was empty except for a rectangular box of shittim wood (acacia) 4 feet long by 2 feet wide and 2 feet high, placed in the exact centre of the floor. This was the Ark of the Covenant which contained three things: two tablets of stone bearing the Ten Commandments and the god Yahweh himself. On top was a thick sheet of solid gold and two wooden cherubim heavily covered with gold, with outstretched wings guarding the precious contents.
These cherubim were Egyptian in style. (4) The Holy of Holies was in permanent darkness except once each year on the Day of Atonement, the High Priest entered with the blood of the national sin-offering, the scapegoat.
This then was the building that the Templars venerated as the central icon of their Order. But it was the ruins of another Temple that they excavated, built almost exactly a thousand years later on the same site by the infamous King Herod.
CONCLUSION
The original Temple built for Solomon was a small Sumerian type building, smaller than his harem, erected to house the troublesome storm god Yahweh rather than as a place of worship. Yahweh himself lived inside the Ark of the Covenant which was housed in the Holy of Holies of the Temple, an area known to Freemasons as the Sanctum Sanctorum. This Ark was constructed and decorated in an Egyptian style and at the eastern doorway to this first temple stood the two pillars known to Freemasons as Boaz and Jachin.
(1) John J. Robinson: Born in Blood
(2) ‘A New Look at King Solomon’s Temple and its Connection with Masonic Ritual’, J.R. Clarke. Published in ARS Quatuor Coronatorum, November 1976.
(3) Peake’s Commentary on the Bible
(4) W.F. Albright: The Archaeology of Palestine
